Living and working the African American Catholic Community I have been subject to some time with names that are often unpronounceable. It is a controversial practice even in the Black community for parents to name their children all sorts of crazy, made-up names that are often intentionally misspelled.

I trip over this especially at Baptisms when I am supposed to solemnly pronounce the name of the child. Even after the irritated mother tells me the third time, I still can’t get it right. But why be angry with me? Why name your child such a strange name? Its all so crazy. They put in apostrophes where none are needed and there seems a minor obsession with the letters ‘Q’ and ‘K’.

Now some may speak of racism, but I have been in the Black community too long to be deaf to the fact that an awful lot of African American folks hate the practice too.

Oddities are spreading to other ethnic groups too. In a recent article in The Atlantic Phillip Cohen writes:

The number of girls given the name Mary at birth has fallen 94 percent since 1961…..The modernization theory of name trends, advanced most famously by the sociologist Stanley Lieberson, sees the rise of individualism in modern naming practices. “As the role of the extended family, religious rules, and other institutional pressures declines,” he wrote, “choices are increasingly free to be matters of taste.” Maryboth a traditional American name and a symbol religious Christianityembodies this trend.

Second, America’s Christian family standard-bearers are not standing up for Mary anymore. It’s not just that there may be fewer devout Christians, it’s that even they don’t want to sacrifice individuality for a (sorry, it’s not my opinion) boring name like Mary. In 2011 there were more than twice as many Nevaehs (“Heaven” spelled backwards) born as there were Marys. (If there is anything more specific going on within Christianity, please fill me in.)

I have referred in this brief article to the “curse” of individualism, because frankly I think some of these names become a hindrance later in life and mothers trying to be creative and individualistic, often saddle their kids with troubles later. Frankly people don’t like to be embarrassed, and when someone tells you their name and you can’t pronounce it, or have to ask again, and even a third time, social relations, and things like job interviews tend to go badly. I mean how do you even pronounce Q’J'Q’Sha? A lot of things break down when you can’t even pass the “go” of exchanging names.

As you might expect, many of these children given strange names, end up going by other nick names. Like “Q” or Shawn or something easier. But really they should not have to, and their strange names will still have to come up at formal occasions and all the awkwardness. And even some of the names that are more pronounceable convey a kind of strangeness that makes people uncomfortable. While not necessarily fair, strange names convey an impression of the person who carries it. We tend to read a lot more in to names that perhaps we should, but the tendency is pre-conscious and is unlikely to change that much.

Interestingly, in Biblical times people were more creative with names than currently. However, they were careful to name their children with a name that was intelligible, that actually meant something. For example, Jesus means “God saves,” Michael means “Who is like God?” Sarah means “princess” and so forth. Thus, observing the essence of a child, the parents named the child on the eighth day after birth.

Controversial article? Sure. But don’t turn it into a race thing, there’s plenty of divided opinion in the African American community as well. Also if you feel offended, try not to take it personally. It is a cultural trend that is being critiqued, not you. The bottom line, in a culture where strange forms of individualism are increasing and exotica is proudly displayed by more and more, it’s good every now and then to ask about limits and encourage some moderation.

By the way, my name almost backward is Epop Selrach if your looking for a clever new name….for your pet, that is.

Forgotten? Not by me! I've read the Kristin trilogy twice, and I wish I had read it 10 years earlier when it would have given me some good sense --- oh dear, wasted youth.

I also tried the Master of Hestviken, much harder to get through. Keeping all the names and relationships srtaight required a more sophisticated technology than Index cards with tiny letters and arows :o/

The scene where Olav kills Teit the Icelander with his axe roiled through my imaginaton for a long time, though.

My own legal name is a nickname for a more formal name. My Mom thought the formal name was too long and they would call me the nickname anyway, so why bother naming me the formal name. The nickname would do. Thanks mom, not.

A good friend in high school was saddled with, as the legal name on his birth certificate, "Timmy".

Needless to say, he fixed it when he was old enough.

103
posted on 12/08/2012 6:58:29 PM PST
by Lee N. Field
("And if you are Christ's, then you are Abraham's offspring, heirs according to promise" Gal 3:29)

You know better than that. Forgotten, yes, like so many other Nobel Prize in lit winners. It's an old complaint about who still remembered should have gotten them, and who now forgotten actually got them. But it's like that society woman who said I think to William F. Buckley, (was it Pauline Kael?), that she didn't understand why Nixon was elected since no one she knew had voted for him. Our personal choices remain our personal choices. And the recent nominees such as the communists Dario Fo and Elfriede Jelinek will most certainly be soon forgotten.

Still a loving parent has an obligation to the child to not intentionally place hinderences in their life or to put the poor child into ackward positions and a lifetime of embarrasment. Then again its also easy to see a lot of these parents are not so loving of their children as can be witnessed most any day at any Walmart.

106
posted on 12/08/2012 7:38:18 PM PST
by X-spurt
(Ted Cruz for President of the Republic of Texas)

I had the misfortune this morning to observe a pair of, I guess, 80 year olds deciding on a Nook device inside a B&N store, while at the same time I am awaiting the arrival of about, I think, 5 more books from a couple of Internet bookstores to add to the pile by my bed. And now this Norwegian writer to check out?

??? I said there was a familial connection, but after a certain number of generations, there is a mix of family names. Do you have the same last name as your maternal great-grandmother? Or your 8x great grandfather? Yet, don’t you still have a familial connection to them? Or are you just trying to be obtuse?

“In 2011 there were more than twice as many Nevaehs (Heaven spelled backwards) born as there were Marys.”

Come on. But then I read the article...

“Incredibly, out of 1.7 million girls’ names recorded by the SSA in 2011, I was able to predict to within 87 how many would be named Mary. By simply taking the number born in 2010 and subtracting the 5-year average decline, I predicted 2,584 would be born; the actual number was 2,671 (an error of 3.3 percent).”

Love that name...the name of several of my female ancestors..spelled slightly differently "Dorothea." One little bit of a girl traveled to America from Germany at the age of 18, all by herself to the middle of completely unsettled Iowa, to join her fiance. Her full given was named "Sophia Margaretha Dorothea Nitch" (but she was known as Dorothea)...a rare female name that was passed down for several generations.

My other favorite ancestral family name was a GG Grandmother, Celestia (Heavenly).

I had a young college perfesser who was so proud of his doctorate work on "Individualism" that the made it the topic of the class.

I couldn't take it after a few weeks and told him that "Individualism" was bunk and that it actually made more folks similar by limiting the methods (dress/hair/tattoos/piercings, etc.) by taking God out of the equation. I told him that real individualism meant just being you and not trying to be an individual because God made all of us different than the others in some wonderful ways.

He didn't like it much, but his father was a good friend so i still got the grade I deserved.

There are some interesting points in the Atlantic article on which Msgr. Pope is commenting. The author writes about the fall and rise of "Emma": Emma was at number three when the SSA records begin, in 1880. She fell almost down to #500 by the 1970s. But after a decade of uncertainty she began a fantastic run, finally reaching number one in 2008.

Then he asks why "Emma" has this pattern, but not other once popular names such as "Mildred" and "Bertha." I suspect this reflects the changing ethnic composition of the United States. Mildred and Bertha are distinctively Germanic names, and German-Americans, having often been in the U.S. for five generations or more, give their children standard names rather than ethnic ones. Then there's simply the ease and simplicity of "Emma," compared to other names that were once popular.

I think another reason many parents today want "uncommon" names for their children is that, like me, they were one of seven girls with "Common Name of 1966" in their elementary school grade, and one of nine women with "Common Name of Late 1960s" in a department at work. In my department at That Insurance Company, there were so many employees with my name that our boss called us "Mrs. Jones," "Mrs. Collins," "Mrs. Garcia." (Very dignified, actually - I kind of liked it!)

My sons have names that often make the top-10 lists - William, Thomas, Patrick, James, Daniel, Francis - but the only one who regularly finds himself in a class with duplicates is Daniel. It seems every family has a Daniel! The girls are "uncommons" - Josephine, Eleanor, Sabina, and Kathleen - because I was traumatized by Common Name 1966 ;-).

No one is disputing that Madison is a last name. The subject here is popular first names. Madison as a first name is claimed to have entered American culture on the heels of a movie (about 1980 where the slutty character adopted the name off a street sign). Do you have evidence of it as a given name before that? If this family has a record of it before that then I'm wrong.

Sometimes the weirdest names are older than we think. I had a boy in Cub Scouts a couple of years ago whose name was “Jett.” Dreadful, I thought, how could they ... but when I was doing a cemetery tour this fall, I saw a stone for a man whose first name was Jett, and he’d lived in the 19th century.

“Kristin Lavransdatter” has stuck in my mind for a long time. I find myself lying in bed thinking about her choices: “But should she have...?” “Why did her father Lavrans...?” “Why did they decide to ..?” “Could it have turned out differently if she had...?”

We had a lady called Winnie in our church. She was very old, died a few years ago. I figured her real name was some variant of Winifreda, since she was from Belgium.

We get some interesting names in the Spanish congregation, because they’re often named for the feast day on which they’re born. One of my best friends is Asuncion, “Assumption,” and the father of one of my Cub Scouts is Dolores, for Our Lady of Sorrows; his wife is Maria Amparo, “Mary, Help of Christians.” Both men and women are commonly named Guadalupe, which sometimes confuses the record-keeping for Sunday School: my list is off on the boy/girl count, because whoever entered them thought both Guadalupe and Genesis were boys, but they’re girls!

A teacher friend of my wife who taught at an inner-city middle school once had a girl student named “Female” (pronounced “Feh-MOLL-ee”. This teacher asked the girl’s mother how she came up with the name and the mother shrugged, “It wuz awready on the birf certificate.”

No one is disputing that Madison is a last name. The subject here is popular first names. Madison as a first name is claimed to have entered American culture on the heels of a movie (about 1980 where the slutty character adopted the name off a street sign). Do you have evidence of it as a given name before that? If this family has a record of it before that then I'm wrong.

According to this,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madison_(name)

Madison as a given name has never been all that popular but was used as a given name for boys well before the 1984 movie Splash. Some examples are:

As far as Madison as a girls name, yes that didnt seem to become a popular name for girls until the 1984 movie Splash which was a modern retelling of the Hans Christian Andersen fairytale The Little Mermaid. I havent seen that movie for years but I dont recall the character Madison as being particularly slutty. OK, she did come out of the ocean and walk around naked but thats because she was a mermaid and rather innocent and naïve and evidently living under the sea as a mermaid, clothing was optional. Then there is the Disney movie version of The Little Mermaid but unlike Madison, Ariel isnt naked but wears strategically placed sea shells. :) ,

LOL, exactly. One local bank had a magazine with the bios of some bank officers. It was the Stump family with first names of Forest and Oak. I was thinking were the rest of the family named Maple and Willow?

Maybe Adder is an old name but suppose they did just use the name because they liked the word? How is that different than the ghetto names the OP thinks are so bad?

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